Persepolis: "The Sheep"

I have to admit, Anoosh really has some good stories! The arrival of Anoosh really shakes things up in the book because he reveals a lot of things that are fundamental for the understanding of the story. We can see that the war between Iraq and Iran is beginning, and Marji is really worried about it. I can sense that Eby doesn’t want to face the truth. We can see his anger and stress in the last frames of page 62 when he gets mad at his daughter because of the news she brought (of course being news that initially came from the radio). He was mad because 99.99% of the people voted for the Islamic Revolution. 

Right now, I made a connection of what is happening in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez. Many people (including me) think that he manipulated the elections and made up the numbers that appeared in the results. We won by 10% advantage over Henrique Capriles Radonski; that would obviously make people suspect that he pushed up his numbers to get to 10% advantage exactly. That sounds fishy, just like the revolutionaries that according to Eby; they manipulated the votes.

Another connection I made to South America was related to pages 63 and 64 that shows Marji’s friends leaving to the United States because they don’t want to be inside Iran when things get ugly. That’s what many people did here in Colombia when FARC was on it’s peak of power. Many people left Colombia to Europe and the United States during those years. There has never been a time where so many people left Colombia. It was for the same reason, people didn’t want to be here when the times were rough. I also feel sorry for her because the boy that she liked left Iran. 

Frame #7 in page 65 reminds me a lot of the period called “La Violencia” in Colombia that was when the conservatives and the liberals fought for many years by killing each other, and creating new forms of torture. Mohsen was drowned in his own bathtub and his sister was executed right in the scene (frame 3 in page 66). Conservatives and liberals killed themselves one by one. Just like how the revolutionaries are killing the people that disagree with them. For them to survive, they need to cross the frontiers undercover. Many liberals escaped to Ecuador and Peru just like Siamak and his family.